“We wanted Drupal to be what is to Linux, that’s why we started Acquia,” says the Belgium-born founder of open source website CMS software Drupal and now co-founder and CTO of Acquia, Dries Buytaert.

Dries Buytaert, Co-Founder and CTO, Acquia

Drupal is free, open-source software that powers millions of websites and online applications. It runs on industry-standard hosting platforms and connects to virtually all legacy systems. With a community of nearly 1 million users and developers, Drupal’s success has spawned an enormous business ecosystem. Acquia empowers enterprises with the open-source web publishing system Drupal. Co-founded by Drupal’s creator in 2007, Acquia helps customers manage their growth and scale their online properties. Acquia’s products, cloud infrastructure, and support enable companies to realize the full power of Drupal while minimizing risk, as it’s done for nearly 1,500 enterprise customers including Twitter, Al Jazeera, Turner, , World Economic Forum, Stanford University, New York Senate and NPR.

“I started Drupal out of my dorm room as an accident. I had planned to spend a free night building it, but would end-up devoting thirteen years of my life on it,” says Buytaert. Even the name Drupal is an accident. “I made a typo when I registered my domain. It was supposed to be “dorp” or Dutch for small village, instead of “drop.” We eventually released the software for drop.org under the name Drupal, which is the English pronunciation of the word ‘druppel,’ or ‘drop’ in Dutch,” says Buytaert.

The name and the service caught on in a big way that Dries never imagined. “In 2001, my site attracted so many people who gave their input and thus was born the crowd-sourced and open source of what is the value ofDrupal. For the first seven years, I worked on it in my spare time. I worked at a start-up. I then went back to college to get my PhD. The inventor of Java, James Gosling, was part of the committee to oversee my Ph.D. thesis defense", says Buytaert.

While Dries was writing his dissertation, he raised $7 million to start-up Acquia from North Bridge Venture Partners, Sigma Partners and Tim O’Reilly’s investment firm AlphaTech Ventures. “Last year, we were the fastest growing software company in the Inc 500, Says Buytaert. Acquia has seen amazing growth, from two people to 400 employees in just six years. They added a hosting product four and a half years ago and grew from managing 4 servers to over 6,000. Their servers manage over 6 billion page views. “It’s a story of disruption—support, plus cloud hosting—Platform as a service (PaaS),” says Buytaert.

There are two reasons behind the company’s explosive growth, according to Buytaert. “A number of stars aligned,” says Buytaert. First, the company is part of a big trend that it can ride on: the ever-faster developments and adoption of mobile, social and ecommerce, leading to increasing website complexity. Second, Acquia’s customers have hundreds of websites. Some even have thousands. “How, as a CIO or chief digital officer, do you deal with this?,” says Buytaert of the tremendous upside opportunity.

Acquia is a platform that makes it easier and more efficient to standardize all of these disparate web entities for corporations. It’s part of the digitization of the world. You need CMS, CRM and marketing automation and a way to integrated them. Every piece of the marketing stack is going to the Cloud and SaaS offering, except the website. “That’s where we come in,” says Buytaert, who feels open source is the only way to compete in today’s world, referring both to how company’s acquire and manage web site technology and to his own business model.

“We’ve managed to recruit exceptional people to Acquia,” says Buytaert of his growing business. One doesn’t think of Antwerp as a bastion of tech start-ups and entrepreneurialism—“it’s more about beer, fashion and chocolate,” says Buytaert. He started the company in Boston because he thought it was the best place to form a global business and also be close to his biggest customers in the U.S. “I like Boston, it feels a little bit European. It’s easily accessible from Belgium and my co-founder was from Boston,” says Buytaert.

Buytaert, his co-founder Jay Batson and CEO Tom Erickson have big plans for Acquia. “I see us as being the next large open source business model to reach $1 billion in revenue, like Red Hat. We’re on the IPO track—even though it’s still early days, but we are getting ready,” says Buytaert.

Dries’ story and upbringing is anything but the conventional tech start-up. “I come from a family of entrepreneurs. My dad is a doctor and ran his own practice as a business. At our family gatherings, everyone talked about their own companies,” says Buytaert. When he was 22 he was already managing a group of engineers when he was working for a start-up company called Acunia in Leuven, Belgium.

He then decided to go back to college to work on his PhD because he knew he needed to learn more and also knew by then that he could not work for a boss in a traditional company. “I don’t always do well with authority,” says Buytaert. He got a government grant, which allowed him to follow his own path. “I had it in my DNA, but in many ways I didn’t know what I was doing," says Buytaert

He had started the Drupal business and drupal.org. But he was a student and had no money and asked a friend to host the first site on his server. “As we grew I had to shift my focus from developing the software to scaling the website. In 2005 the server melted. I needed $3,000 to buy a new server, but I didn’t have any money. I crowd-sourced the funding by asking our customers to help. I got $10,000 in the first 24 hours after posting the request to the Drupal community. Amazingly, the CTO from Sun Microsystems called me and told me he was going to donate a $7,000 server to the organization. Then the University of Oregon called and offered to host our servers for free. Within 24 hours, we had free service, free hosting and a free server. It was a huge tipping point for the effort and made me realize the importance of what we doing,” says Buytaert of his good fortune.

Dries’ Ph.D. was all about JAVA. When he was about to finish his dissertation, he was providing support for companies using Drupal. “That was instrumental in my decision to start my own business. I was at a cross-roads, trying to figure my next step. I took a road trip to San Francisco and met with folks like Tim O’Reilly (now an investor in Acquia). Acquia was born because I wanted to turn my passion into a full-time job,” says Buytaert.

“My motive is to do well and to do good. I admire organizations like Doctors Without Borders and strive to emulate them,” says Buytaert. Hundreds of non-profits use Drupal. The White House site wethepeople.org uses Drupal. They allow anyone to petition their government. So Dries feel like he is helping governments like the United States to do a better job of representing the needs and desires of their citizens. “It’s a great feeling that we help governments better interact with their citizens,” says Buytaert.